1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for planning support for decision making in planning and analyzed works. More particularly, the present invention relates to a planning support system and process for accomplishing an intelligent data managing method in a support system for quick planning, such as scheduling and designing, with use of variety of data.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In order to allow for drastic changes of consumers' needs in recent years, it is necessary to quickly plan new products. For the purpose, computers are requested to support the planning and analyzing works. The system for use in such a purpose is called a strategic information system. The strategic information system aims at comprehensive use o the computer in the planning and analyzing works, while conventional computer systems are to chiefly attain higher efficiency as a basic information system.
It could be asserted that using the computers in the planning and analyzing works is backed by the following factors.
(1) The planning and analyzing works have been made more important to allow for the age of individualism. It is needed to adequately process an enormous amount of information generated by the basic information system built up so far.
(2) The environments where enterprises are placed have experienced greater changes. As we cannot expect to optimize a whole system, it is problematic to make the system satisfiable. For this reason, it is difficult to uniquely define any plan in a simple view that the plan can be made up or not. For example, it is occasionally needed to use a way of multi-level evaluation at the time of planning that can keep a least necessary evaluation index, depending on the situation of a process system, as all the conditions cannot be satisfied in preparing the plan. This leads to a problem of how to define plan evaluation of any system when the situations of the evaluation indexes and the operating methods corresponding to them are specified at several levels. That is, it is a relaxation problem of restrictive conditions.
(3) The situations where the system is in place are changing drastically corresponding to quick variations of events in the bustling world. For the planning in such difficult situations as experts have not experienced, designers have low confidence in planning guides and rules without a rational method to obtain a satisfying solution. For this reason, it is necessary to use a trial and error approach. This however has the disadvantage that it takes an excessive amount of time.
Support by computer for planning and analysis involves a problem that man and computer are to share the role. In particular, the support by computer is needed for effective use of human resources so that a brilliant planner can smoothly carry on his or her work. For the purpose, the computer has to proceed at a pace of man's working process.
However, no conventional computer systems have such a deliberation For this, the planner is often compelled to wait for his or her process for long time in front of the computer, particularly in a planning and analyzing that has to deal with enormous amount of data, such as point-of-sales (POS) data, and the data which are not made in forms.
To overcome such a difficult situation, the computer has been usually made to have higher speed, or graded up. To process enormous amount of data in a few seconds, it has the disadvantage that a high-speed computer has to be used. It also has the disadvantage that its cost performance is low. There has been demand of making improvement of the process in view of the cost performance of the computer.
In order to reduce memory capacity with computation speed being kept, a large scale computer has usually employed cache memory. The cache memory practice is desirable basically for processing of such kind of data (conventional data) which is known after a calculation task, namely a formatted data. However, it has the disadvantage that it is less effective for the system that has to process non-formatted data which are not known to come next.
The following describes the problems pointed out above in detail referring to FIG. 15 which shows a hardware configuration for a conventional planning support system. As an example, data necessary for the planning which is made by a planner with use of a workstation 3 WS exist in a database (hereinafter referred to as the DB) a host computer. Let a planning program be in the workstation 3 as an example.
In FIG. 15 are indicated the host computer 1, a communication line 2, the workstation 3, the host DB 15, and a workstation DB 39.
The planner enters a data input request into the workstation 3 in his or her planning work. The workstation 3 in turn gives the data input request through the communication line 2 to the host computer 1. The host computer 1 in turn transmits the data concerned from the host DB 15 to the workstation 3. The workstation 3 in turn stores the data fed into the workstation DB 39 and after this, sends them to the planner.
FIG. 16 is a software configurations for use in the host computer 1 and the workstation 3 in the conventional planning support system. In FIG. 16(a), the host computer 1 has a communication processor 11, an operating system OS 12, a job processor 13, and a DB manager 14 provided therein. In FIG. 16(b) is indicated a communication processor 31. In the figure, also, the workstation 3 has an operating system OS 32 therefor, a planning interface 33, a DB manager 34, a planning process controller 35, planning processes 36, an input processor 37, and a planning memory 38 therein.
In the planning work, the planner enters the data input request with use of functions of the planning interface 33 of the workstation 3. The planning interface 33 in turn transfers the request to the planning process controller 35. The planning process controller 35 starts the input processor 37 before giving the data input request to the host computer 1 through communication processor 31. On the other hand, the host computer 1 transfers the request to the operating system OS 12 when the communication processor 11 receives it from the workstation 3. The operating system OS 12 in turn starts the DB manager 14 before taking the data concerned from the host DB 15. The operating system OS 12 then sends the data to the workstation 3 through the communication processor 11.
In the workstation 3, the operating system OS 32 receives the data through the communication processor 31 before sending them to the DB manager 34. The DB manager 34 in turn stores the data sent in the workstation DB 39 and after this, returns them to the planning interface 33. The planner processes the data stored in the workstation DB 39 with use of a process program of the planning processes 36 if necessary. He or she then displays the results through the planning interface 33 and if the results are desirable, stores them in the planning memory 38 before ending the process.
As described in detail, the conventional planning support system is to force the human job to work at its pace. For this reason, the planner is often compelled to wait for his or her process for a long time in front of the computer.